This week’s portion opens with, and derives its name from, these words: “zot chukat haTorah asher tzivah Adonai lemor - this is the ritual law that GOD has commanded”. The ritual law commanded in this instance is one that may be less well known to my Reform and liberal Jewish readers, the commandment of the red heifer. For those of you who are less familiar I’ll admit that I did not know this piece of Torah until my rabbinical studies. The commandment goes as follows: a red heifer is to be brought to the priest. It is then sacrificed and burned in its entirety down to ashes. The ashes are then collected and saved to be used later as the water of lustration, used in purification rituals. In contrast to the ashes, the priest, the person who burned the bull and the one who collected the ashes are rendered ritually impure through this act.
Now, for those of you who are already asking ‘what in the world is this for’ or ‘why are we commanded to do this,’ you should feel good about that instinct because it is precisely what the rabbis of antiquity asked as well. They had two primary difficulties with this commandment. The first was, how can the same act render its practitioners impure but the substance resulting from it purifies? The internal contradiction is stark. The second, unlike other mitzvot in the Torah for which are provided justification for why we practice them, here it is only stated that it is chukat haTorah - a ritual law commanded by God.
There are two texts I want to share to show how the rabbis dealt with these difficulties that arose from the commandment. The first is from the Talmud in reference to the verse from Leviticus, “and you shall observe my laws.” (Leviticus 19:19) The rabbis explain that this commandment is in reference to matters in the Torah about which other nations and none other than Satan himself challenge the Jewish people. For example the prohibition of eating pork, the prohibition of wearing shatnez (wearing more than one kind of fabric in the same garment) amongst others. The Talmud teaches that “And lest you say these have no reason and are meaningless acts, therefore the verse states: “I am the Lord” (Leviticus 18:4), to indicate: I am the Lord, I decreed these statutes and you have no right to doubt them.” (Yoma 67b) According to the Talmud there is no place for doubt when it comes to God’s decrees. The ‘why’ cannot be understood but the act itself still holds meaning.
The second text is a midrash in which a non-Jew comes before Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai and challenges him asking, “These rituals you do, they seem like witchcraft! You bring a heifer, burn it, crush it up, and take its ashes. If one of you is impure by the dead [the highest type of impurity], 2 or 3 drops are sprinkled on him, and you declare him pure?!" Ben Zakkai responds and asks if the non-Jew had ever experienced someone in his community being taken over by a restless spirit. The non-Jew replies that had. Ben Zakkai then asks how they dealt with this unfortunate situation and the non-Jew explains the process saying, "We brought roots and made them smoke beneath him, and poured water and [the spirit] fled." Rabbi ben Zakkai responds, “do you hear what just came out of your mouth?” What you just explained is basically the same principle, a ceremony with a process and steps yet no explanation that leads to our desired outcome. The non-Jew walks away seemingly satisfied by the interaction. Then ben Zakkai’s students, displeased with their teacher’s response, turn to him and ask, “rabbi, you sent him away with a pretty weak explanation, how will you explain the same tension to us?” To this challenge ben Zakkai replied, “by your lives, a dead person doesn't make things impure, and the water doesn't make things pure. Rather, God said, 'I have engraved a rule, I have decreed a decree, and you have no permission to transgress what I decreed, as it says [quoting this week’s portion] "This is a chok (law) of the Torah."
Ben Zakkai says to his students, perhaps unexpectedly to those who are less familiar with rabbis of antiquity, the ceremony itself does not actually render someone pure. They are looking in the wrong place, questioning the act of purification when that does not particularly matter. What is significant is that the law was received from God. The doing of the action should be enough, even when a coherent explanation cannot be offered.
Now this line of thinking may have been acceptable to our ancestors from ages past and for our Orthodox sisters and brothers today. But for us liberal Jews this explanation is almost entirely foreign. Just because it is written in the Torah therefore we should follow the rule? Rabbi Laurie Rice offers a Reform take on this midrash:
“Rabban Yochanan doesn't provide a reason... because there is no clear reason. He simply asserts that we are Jews and it's a mitzvah, so we are to do it without justification. And perhaps, just maybe, in the doing there will come understanding. This idea of naaseh v'nishma--we shall do and then we will come to understand--is not easily packaged and sold to liberal Jews. We are methodical about our actions; we are conscientious regarding our engagements. And yet there are some things we do, not because they are rational, but because they link us to a shashelet shel kabbalah, "a chain of tradition," by the mere fact that others before us have done it that way as well. We light candles on Shabbat, we circumcise our newborn sons, we stand under a chuppah when we get married, and we (or at least our biblical ancestors) slaughter a red cow and use its ashes to purify ourselves when we come in contact with a corpse.The concept of naaseh v'nishma maintains that when we do mitzvot that may not seem logical or rational on the surface, they will come to have great meaning through the repetition of performance.”
How many of you light Shabbat lights, have had friends and family married under a chuppah and even once demanded to stop the proceedings in the middle of the ceremony asking ‘why are we doing this?’ As much as we want to see ourselves as entirely rational beings whose actions are all measured and considered, even if we think we behave only in this manner, I would posit that the reality is more complex. That our connection to reason, science, logic, however you want to define, only shapes our behavior to a certain point. The beauty in these rabbinical teachings, both ancient and modern, is that it allows us to also discern meaning through doing, even when meaning has not been mathematically, methodically laid out to us beforehand.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel explained this phenomenon thusly:
In carrying out a sacred deed, we unseal the wells of faith...A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought [or faith]. He is asked to surpass his needs, to do more than he understands in order to understand more than he does. In carrying out the word of the Torah he is ushered into the presence of spiritual meaning. Through the ecstasy of deeds he learns to be certain of the hereness of God. Right living is a way to right thinking.
I would take this internal Jewish tension between the rational and the irrational, the explicable and the inexplicable and extrapolate it out further to our everyday lives. I would challenge the notion that, even we who see ourselves as modern, reasoned human beings, do not live entirely according to rules of logic and reason. Think about your lucky golf socks, the correct order in making your favorite sandwich, the crazy things you have done for the people you love, the list could go on and on. None of those actions or series of actions are based on cold calculation, in dry logic. All of them contain an inexplicable, internal “logic” that we create for ourselves in the course of our natural existence as human beings. And the fact that it is not based on science or math in no way shape or form diminishes the meaning behind these rituals and actions
If we can accept that not all of our choices and actions are not entirely based in logic, I encourage you to take that same mindset towards faith, towards our tradition. Writing off meaning from the seemingly inexplicable only assures that no meaning can ever be discerned from it. But, if we can set aside our absolute demand for reason as a necessary prerequisite for meaning and significance, I believe that we allow ourselves a greater ability to connect to both our tradition and, by extension, to ourselves.
Shabbat Shalom.
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